Better late than never, but I definitely wanted to write a little bit about my trip to FOSDEM this year! It all started off with a little downer due to some flight delays / reschedules but all of us eventually arrived at around 15:00 at Motel One Rue Royale, ready to grab some dinner and then some drinks at the official beer event.
More tired than expected we missed the first couple of slots the next day (Saturday) but at least had a delicious breakfast at Paul! I’m pretty sure, if we had one of these in Graz, it would be the end of me.
OK, but how was FOSDEM itself? It was fantastic! In fact, I enjoyed this year’s event probably more than the last two combined! Unlike previous years I experimented a little bit with the tracks but also didn’t try too hard to get into specific talks. Instead, I jumped mostly between tracks and also took some time off when I felt like it in order to get some coding done.
There was one big change in the available rooms this year that helped with that: A second large cafeteria called Chez Théo was now available alongside the rather small one in building F. Not all that many power outlets but still… That new space came at one cost: The bar below Janson was gone now. At first I was really sad about that simply because this was my first real memory of FOSDEM: A bar below the main session hall with snacks and beer. On the other hand, let’s be honest: That room down there had two primary attributes: Overcrowded and freezy. I’m pretty sure I caught at least one cold over the years down there. The new cafeteria is heated and large enough to make it really hard to overcrowd it.
As for the talks, I managed to get into the following sessions:
- Civil society needs Free Software Hackers (Lightning talk)
- A tool for Community Supported Agriculture (Lightning talk)
- What’s in my food? (Lightning talk)
- HTTP/3 for everyone (Keynote)
- Continuous Delivery starts with Continuous Infrastructure (CI/CD)
- An event based approach for CI/CD pipelines (CI/CD)
- [Mario’s adventures in Tekton land](Mario’s adventures in Tekton land https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/marios_adventures_in_tekton_land/ 10:30 - 11:10) (CI/CD)
- GNUnet (Decentralized Internet)
- The Path to Peer-to-Peer Matrix (Decentralized Internet)
- FOSSH - 2000 to 2020 and beyond! (Keynote)
- FOSDEM@20 - A Celebration (Keynote)
Still lots of talks to watch as recordings. For instance (as you can see from the list above) I didn’t go to the Go, Rust, or Monitoring-tracks at all this year and only saw a handful of talks in the CI/CD devroom. So I’ll probably spend 10 hours more on watching all those talks that I’ve missed 😂
I just hope I’ll be able to catch up by January next year when FOSDEM 2021 comes!
Oh, before I forget: Yes, it rained again but this time at least not every day 🥳
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